Do you use Surveys as part of your B2B demand generation strategy?

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Five tips for designing effective B2B lead generation Surveys

We all know that Surveys are one of the great ways conducting market research in order to understand our customers and market behavior, characteristics, profile etc. Have you ever thought of using the Survey techniques for doing an exclusive lead generation?  Try designing one short and simple survey to identify the pain points of your prospects and or customers with the following tips:

1.Describe your campaign target market carefully:  You can define your target market using some of these qualifiers:

a. Revenue 

b. Employee count

c. Industry

d. Geography

Example: Target 150 companies with a revenue of  $10-$100 million in the business of “software-as-a-service” located in mid western USA.

2. Respondents Selection: Define your contacts by Title or Role. Like VP or Director of Marketing, HR or IT. In some cases a functional role classification may be more appropriate for your product or service. So you can say like this, “the person responsible for email marketing in your company” or “ the person responsible for “ storage systems”. You should also clearly identify if the people you are targeting are Decision Makers, Influencers or Users of your product of service.

3. Survey Methodology: Choose between Telephonic or web surveys. Answer to some of these questions will help you choose between the two

a. Do you have any existing relationship with the respondents?

b. Do you have an established brand?

c. Do you have a database with contact information like phone numbers and email address of the respondents?

d.Will using your company name or brand bias the results? 

For example if you answered yes to question a, b & c web surveys could work best for you. And if you answered No to Questions a, b and c telephonic surveys could be a better choice.

4. Survey questions:

a. Type of questions: Avoid open ended questions and rather design your questions with aided answers like multiple choice or “Yes” or “No” responses.  

b. Number of questions: Try to limit your questions to no more than eight on a Telephonic survey. If using a web form, measure how much time it takes to complete one survey. Try to limit it to 5 minutes. In both cases Telephonic and Web inform your respondents in the beginning that it will not take more than say five minutes of their precious time.

c. Solicitation: Avoid or rephrase any questions that sound like a sales pitch or make the respondent believe they may be followed up with sales calls. On the contrary try to identify the pain points that your product and service can alleviate

d.Reporting and Analytics: Visualize how would you like the survey results to be presented in a report format. Can the responses be summarized and presented in graphs, bar or pie diagrams etc.

5. In-House Vs Outsource: Estimate how many resources and time will it take to administer the survey campaign. Consider if you have the resources and tools to do it in-house. For example if you have the databases with contact information of the respondents and also have an email/ web platform to administer the survey you can easily design and run the survey yourself. However keep in mind that sometimes the respondents need to be followed up and motivated to take the surveys. In case you do not have the databases or resources you can hire an external market research or a telemarketing firm that has an experience conducting such B2B lead generation.

The point: If designed smartly, even a small survey campaign can generate highly qualified exclusive leads for your business.